Procedural delays sink SF fireboat grant

Talk about missing the boat - the San Francisco Fire Department just lost a $7.8 million federal grant for the city's first new fireboat in 50 years because it didn't spend the money in time.

"It's just a huge disappointment," said Fire Commission member Steve Nakajo.

"And believe me, we want to know what happened."

It all began in late 2009 when the Federal Emergency Management Agency tentatively awarded the city a port security grant for a new boat - provided the city secured matching funds.

It wasn't until January 2011, however, that the feds signed off on the city's request to use a grant from Chevron to help cover the costs.

The catch was that, by then, the Fire Department had to have the boat built and ready to go within 2 1/2 years.

The first step was getting a design, a process that apparently had to be aborted when one of the bidders objected to the criteria used to award the contract. It took months to get a new $400,000 contract in place.

Then the construction bids went out. But we're told more undisclosed problems prompted the city to toss out the two bids submitted, and a second round was ordered in February.

Recently the new proposals came in, and the winner reportedly came in at $12 million.

The problem: Now there's no way the 90-foot "super pumper" can be built by the end of next month to meet the federal deadline.

Even enlisting the Firefighters Union in a last-minute round of lobbying, Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi couldn't salvage the deal.

"I know people want to blame whoever dropped the ball, and I don't see it that way," Guzman said. "We were trying everything to make it work."

He said the department will apply soon for another federal grant. But Tom O'Connor, head of the Firefighters Union, says that's not good enough.

"Every major port city in America has received and spent their grant money in the same time frame," O'Connor said. "Now our union is hiring consultants to help guide the department through the process, because they seem to have an inability to both get and spend the federal funds on time."

Off the blotter: Oakland interim Police Chief Sean Whent hasn't been getting much sleep since he took over the department Friday - and with good reason.

A close reading of the Bratton Report shows a department so understaffed that it has only one investigator for burglaries, one investigator for non-gun assaults, and a robbery team that may take five to seven working days just to talk with the victim.

But the real chiller is the state of the homicide unit, which had many of its sergeants shipped out to cover shorthanded beat patrols.

The report drawn up by ex-LAPD Chief William Bratton and his group found that many of the investigators who remain in the unit either had no previous experience investigating killings or "no previous investigations experience of any kind."

This in a city with 131 homicides last year.

Mayor Jean Quan has promised to rectify the situation by following the report's recommendation to split the city for policing purposes into five districts, each with its own team of investigators.

But even here, Whent is up against a wall. With only 640 officers citywide, the department simply doesn't have the manpower to fully implement the plan.

"We certainly need more, but we're not going to have more cops right now," Whent said.

But he added, "There will be an improvement over what we have now, and over time we will get better and better."

Meanwhile, the court-appointed monitor overseeing the OPD has put in his first request for funds to clean up the department's internal problems.

On the shopping list: everything from Tasers to police radios to consultants for monitoring racial profiling - at a cost of more than $2 million and counting.

On track: After nearly six weeks of back and forth over such details as where to meet, BART and its key unions are finally sitting down to talk about a new contract.

The first two weeks of talks are being held at the Amalgamated Transit Union offices across the street from the Lake Merritt BART Station in Oakland, and the next two will be at BART's headquarters in the Kaiser Center.

One union issue on the table is improving safety for station agents - although from the looks of things, that's not the only problem that needs addressing.

Just a couple of weeks back, BART police arrested a 42-year-old station agent at the Coliseum Station on suspicion of embezzlement after he was allegedly caught with a stack of used BART tickets. Authorities think he was using them in a counterfeiting operation.

When officers arrested him at his post in the BART station, they allegedly found him in possession of an unspecified "controlled substance."

A 26-year-old female acquaintance was also arrested - with what police described as "a large bag of marijuana" for sale.

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays. Matier can be seen on the KPIX TV morning and evening news. He can also be heard on KCBS radio Monday through Friday at 7:50 a.m. and 5:50 p.m. Got a tip? Call (415) 777-8815, or e-mail matierandross@sfchronicle.com.